Malaria

Tag archives for Malaria

Holy crap! This is so clever!! A synthetic sex ratio distortion system for the control of the human malaria mosquito Component #1– Anopheles gambiae, the kind of mosquito that is notorious for spreading malaria. Component #2– I-PpoI, a protein that ‘sees’ a specific DNA sequence, and cuts it. aka, a homing endonuclease. It was originally found…

The Evolutionary Consequences of Blood-Stage Vaccination on the Rodent Malaria Plasmodium chabaudi The concept of vaccination is, superficially, simple– Safely mimic ‘infection’ so your immune system learns how to fight a pathogen, without needing to get sick from the genuine pathogen. Then if you are ever exposed to the real, scary pathogen, your immune system…

Conceptually, vaccines are very simple things– Dummy viruses/bacteria/pathogen that train your immune system how to fight the real viruses/bacteria/pathogen. All the benefits of being sick (training your B- and/or T-cells how to fight the pathogen) without actually having to get sick. Nice. In practice, however, things are infinitely more difficult. Sometimes we use dead viruses.…